![]() If people enjoy the work despite its grim setting, this trope does not apply and if people dislike a work because it's too depressing, Angst Aversion applies instead (as mentioned above). It only applies when there is no meaningful conflict because everyone is awful and the world sucks, and therefore there are no stakes for the audience. That is just Complaining About Shows You Don't Like. This trope frequently gets misused for any work that is dark, angsty, or depressing. It is possible for a work to be both, of course. Not to be confused with Angst Aversion, which is when people avoid a work because they hear that it is too dark or depressing. See also Too Happy to Live, Too Good for This Sinful Earth, True Love Is Boring and maybe Too Cool to Live. Compare and contrast Glurge, which is what happens when you combine the sickeningly sweet and the depressingly dark. When this happens to the characters within a show, it can be Safety in Indifference or even Despair Event Horizon.Ĭontrast Sweetness Aversion, this trope's polar opposite, and also Rooting for the Empire, but only when all sides involved are evil and yet the audience still likes them. There are plenty of comedies, typically black or Kafka comedies, that tend to be so dark or mean-spirited that audiences will struggle to find anything funny about it.Ĭompare Angst Dissonance, Eight Deadly Words, Audience-Alienating Premise, Sadist Show, and Only the Author Can Save Them Now, although they can overlap. Keep in mind, however, that a work doesn't necessarily have to be angsty to qualify for this trope. This reaction is often the result of writers believing that True Art Is Angsty, and going overboard with it. If everyone likes the dark and bleak situation, then it might seem like everyone in the story is a Broken-System Dogmatist. It might seem like there is, but ultimately, if you're given a choice between supporting one of two equally horrible groups of people, or one of two equally despairing outcomes, then it's a Morton's Fork there's not really a choice at all, the outcome is going to be awful either way, so who cares who wins? Even if someone gets a happy ending, they don't deserve it. In other words, there is nothing really at stake. Makes it even worse when only sympathetic characters/characters with lighter grey/ lighter black morality are killed off for no reason. Even if the heroes are not only heroic because the authors say they are, stories with sympathetic heroes can still suffer from this trope because the characters lack any agency-if anything good happens to them, it'll be jerked away regardless. This permutation of the Eight Deadly Words tends to crop up when the setting is extremely but meaninglessly dark and edgy, or all sides in the conflict are evil (or at least far enough gone that the difference is negligible). Too Bleak, Stopped Caring occurs when a conflict exists that simply lacks any reason for the audience to care about how it is resolved. ![]() ![]() Meaningful conflict is the soul of drama. However, we here at TV Tropes would like to propose an amendment to this phrase which includes something important but sadly all-too-often forgotten, as tropes are, after all, tools: It is often said that "conflict is the soul of drama." Without some form of conflict to fuel things there's no engine to drive the story and thus little reason to become invested in it.
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